YouTube Goes International...Sans Germany.

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YouTube Goes International...Sans Germany.

At Google's Press Day event in Paris today,YouTube announced that it will be launching nine local-language versions of its site in a push to broaden and personalize its reach. Brazil,Britain,France,Ireland,Italy, and Japan are just some of the nine countries launched today, with more promised on the way. For local users this means finally having access to a homepage and infrastructure that's not only translated into the local language, but also content that's geared towards the region.

Even with the new sites, international users will still have access to the original site, as well as all the others. "It is not that we want to limit content by geography," YouTube's International Manager, Sakina Arsiwala told Reuters. "Right now, the content will be available to everyone, unless the (media) partner specifies otherwise."

YouTube's announcement comes at an interesting time for the international community, as Yahoo's Flickr still seems to be hashing out a solution for its user revolts in Germany, Hong Kong, and Singapore due to allegations of censorship. If there is legal precedent in the case of Germany (as Flickr's staff has implied) then perhaps YouTube has managed to dodge a bullet on this one. I've already sent an inquiry to YouTube's folks about Germany specifically, so we'll see what they come forward with as an explanation.